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INTRODUCTION Racism is everywhere. You can’t go anywhere in today’s society without bumping into some form of racism. Race is a social group based on the physical differences of skin tone, hair texture, and facial features. The differences contribute to our uniqueness and humanity. Because people can be grouped by any number of physical differences (height, foot size, resistance to certain diseases), race is no more significant than any other trait. But that is so far from the truth. In today’s society people of different races get abused phsycally, verbally, emotionally and so on. If someone is of a different race than you, that gives you no right to put them down, hurt them, or make them feel lesser than you, nor do they have the right to do that to you. WHAT IS RACISM? According to the Oxford Dictionary of Current English racism is defined as: 1. A belief in the superiority of a particular race; predjudice based on this. 2. Antagonism towards another race. As stated by Sociology in Our Times racism is described as: An organized set of beliefs about the innate inferiority of some racial groups, combined with the power to transform these ideas into practices that deny or exclude equaltiy of treatment on the basis of race. In the book Racism, Robert Miles quotes Wellman when he says, “A racist is someone who defends, protects or enhances social organization based on racial dissadvantage. It is determined by the consequences of a sentiment, not its surface qualities. White racism is what what peole do to protect the special benefits they gain by the virtue of their skin colour.” (Wellman 1977, 52) Until the 1930’s Negroes were believed to be inferior to white people. They were inferior in the following ways: Culturally – Black people did not originate from the same place whites do, and their culture is different, and less accepted. Aesthetically – whites felt, and some still do feel that they are the ‘normal’ way people should look, and blacks are different and therefore lesser than them. Intellectually – They looked different, and acted differently, so they must not be as intellectually smart as whites. Morally – Seeing as many of the everday acts of culture, intellect, and even appearance were different, their morals must be different, or even non existant. During this time discrimination took place against Negroes for jobs, education, and housing. Within the criminal justice system this discrimination was not considered to be morally wrong.. Discrimination is an understatement of the conditions blacks went through that included enslavement, rape, lyching, beating, murdering, unjust imprisonment and humiliation of blacks by whites that went on for hundreds of years. Those who were mistreated were also separated and excluded.This refers to the physical segregation that occurred by race in housing, employment, and public facilities for non-whites after the civil war. In the 1950’s posisibility of integration between blacks and whites became a topic of national contraversy, and differences viewed between races as a result of dissadvantage for non-whites (especially in education) that were kept in place by white bigotry. Segregation in schools, work places and public facilities were defended by whites. Naomi Zack says in her book Thinking about Race, “Integration would result in ‘miscegenation’ mixed race offspring from interracial marriage and sex.” (39) After the civil rights were secured for blacks in the mid 1960’s they began calling themselves ‘blacks’ and ‘Afro-Americans’ instead of Negroes, and during this time the concept of racism developed. According to the textbook, Sociology in our Times there are a variety of different kinds of racism. Redneck Racism: is an unhidden type of racism. It takes it’s form in public statements regarding the inferiority of people that belong to a different racial or ethnic group. An example of redneck racism would be the white supremacist group, the Klu Klux Klan.(314) Polite Racism: is an attempt to disguise a dislike of others through behaviour that appears not to be harmful. An example of this would be discrimination in the work place, a black man not getting the job because of the colour of his skin, even though he is as skilled (or even more skilled) as the white man who got hired.
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